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“... only adjective in all these references, is ‘naive’. Allegories of Reading thus opens with a grand gesture of false humility, an inside joke for the elect: ‘I began to read Rousseau seriously in preparation for a historical reflection on Romanticism and found myself unable to progress beyond local difficulties of interpretation.’ De Graef gives a ...”

“... to hold apart the irresistible gravity and closure of the Earth’s crust. Muir called it ‘a grand page of mountain manuscript that I would gladly give my life to be able to read’, then did just that, moving across it with the freedom of a flying, swimming creature. He knew it through shepherding and sawmill working; he sensed the curve of its ...”

“... a vivid and enveloping sense of Lutyens and his world. Here is an accomplished display in the Grand Manner, a gourmet guide to Lutyens which proclaims, according to the catalogue, ‘the joy of architecture’. Like the exhibition, the catalogue explores Lutyens’s works chronologically and his styles thematically, from Vernacular to ...”

“... disagree with, and attempt to destroy or deconstruct, the priority and privilege of the Grand Tradition of ‘first philosophy’, they represent contrasting attitudes about its results and aftermath. Their opposition is itself considered a basic division in 20th-century thought. Dreyfus and Rabinow think that Foucault’s work transcends this ...”

“... catalogue of failures, the years from the 1870s to the 1930s saw what may prove to be the last grand flowering of Utopian designs. One late 19th-century approach, exemplified by Ruskin in his Guild of St George and by William Morris in his News from Nowhere, sought salvation in a world of rustic, artsy-craftsy, thatched and timbered, anti-machine ...”

“... Ceiling of 1977 (in which a group of East European intellectuals spend an evening in a grand apartment with a visiting American writer, none of them sure whether the ornate ceiling contains a microphone), Bigsby suggests that a debate about the nature of reality goes back to the plays of the 1940s and 1950s, that ‘behind the moral concerns, the ...”

“... His perspective is usually closer to that of the servant than to the deluded or untrustworthy grand, or would-be grand, among his characters. Peggotty, humbly loving and faithful, nevertheless reports the death of Clara Copper-field with a sentiment strangely approaching triumph, as a predicted and welcome event: ‘Oh ...”

“... Yale University has given an ‘Age of Boswell’ to the 20th century. This second volume of the grand Frederick Pottle-Frank Brady biography marks the climax of that long achievement. Climax, but not end: in some country-house loft or uncleared bank vault, I would bet, lies the huge bundle which is the missing Johnson-Boswell correspondence. But that ...”

“... cat) and suggests that scientists need something for which ‘exploratory impulsion’ is not too grand a name. But what about delight and wonder at the works of nature? Without these you might as well join Scotland Yard instead. What else draws people into science? It seems to me that, just as the Church did in former times, science offers a safe niche where ...”

“... to a power of veto when we broach the metaphysical question about what persons are. Answers to the grand metaphysical questions must fall into line with our ordinary practices, she claims, because these are basic to the concept of a person. So the best way to elaborate a theoretically satisfactory concept of persons is to examine these practices very ...”

“... his Irishness, but the editors of this new edition of Goldsmith’s letters, Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy, urge its importance, and they are surely right. Some of the ideas that persistently recur in Goldsmith’s work – opposition to imperialism, scepticism about English notions of liberty – seem to be manifestations of his nationality. He ...”

“... favourite from the start and duly emerged as the winner. But he did not win by a short head from David Lloyd George. You have to scour the list to find him in 79th place, listed as ‘English, born Manchester (1858-1928)’. The part about Manchester is correct: Lloyd George’s father – who was not the only Welsh schoolteacher to move there – died there ...”

“... after a great adventure involving many bales of handwritten papers turning up in the attics of grand houses, and which, together, show Boswell to have been a biographer, and an autobiographer, of enormous pizzazz and originality.Boswell’s way of talking about himself can seem to us very modern: pre-Freud and pre-tabloid, he talks in a shockingly open way ...”

“... three books, in which the two genres are combined, that label can properly be applied only to David Malouf’s 12 Edmondstone Street. An intimate apprehension of time and place informs the long title essay, which probes into the remembered experience of a child’s association with the house in Brisbane where he was born. As such it is a genuine journey ...”

“... The portrait of Lord Goodman on the jacket of his memoirs is from a photograph; the one on David Selbourne’s book is from a portrait by Lucian Freud. In the first he looks severe but quizzical, a kind man but not a man to be put upon; in the second he looks quite desperately sad, as if he had done much to little or no avail, and might well have been put upon quite heavily ...”